1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of performing printer status acquisition processing by a client terminal which designates execution of pull printing in a printing system, especially a pull printing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, the publicizing of services on the Internet as cloud services has become an expanding business. Providing services as cloud services has various advantages such that the need for hardware management for each customer can be obviated by installing a wide variety of servers in a large-scale data center, and a resource can be easily added in accordance with the load on the server. Along with this, even the function of a print server needs to be provided as a print service on the Internet. This boosts a demand for an environment where a printer acquires print data from the print server via the Internet to perform pull type printing (pull printing).
A printing system in which a print server and printer exist within an intranet is capable of push type printing (push printing). In this printing, the print server directly communicates with the printer to acquire a printer status (for example, printable, power off, paper jam, or no paper). Then, the print server directly sends print data to the printer. In this environment, when the user selects a printer before printing, he can select it based on the printer status. A prior art for preventing illicit printing by presenting a list of printers capable of printing to the user before printing is, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-337681. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-337681 proposes a method in which the print server sends a list of printers capable of printing to the printer, and the printer acquires the printer list and updates the held printer list using the new list of printers capable of printing that has been sent from the print server.
A print server expanded as a cloud service on the Internet resides in an environment where the print server communicates with a printer over a firewall. In this case, the print server cannot directly acquire a printer status. Unless the printer status can be acquired correctly, a list of printers capable of printing cannot be presented correctly.